I think there's a fundamental gap in this analysis, which is how hyper-local many of the inequalities are.
Manchester has a GDP per capita of £59,000. Tameside, the poorest area in Greater Manchester, has a GDP per capita of £19,000. Leeds has a GDP per capita of £42k; ten miles away, Bradford has a GDP per capita of £23.6k.
Those disparities are really difficult to explain in terms of infrastructure or commercial investment. Similar disparities exist within London, although for plausibly different reasons; compare Lewisham with the neighbouring Southwark, Camden with Haringey, or that one bit of Tower Hamlets with the rest of Tower Hamlets.
I think we need to be looking much more granularly at the gaps between neighbouring areas, schools and families - the human capital factors that trap people in lives of poverty. Building a university or innovation hub in Knowsley probably won't do much for the huge numbers of kids there who leave school unable to read and write.
Specifically on the GDP per capita numbers you quote, it's important to know what the "capita" means here. In your numbers, the capita is of residents. So people who commute into Manchester to work are counted in the GDP side of the equation and not in the capita side of the equation giving a largely meaningless number when comparing the strength of an economy. In the case of Leeds and Bradford that you mention it's largely the same effect. When someone commutes from Ilkley or Harrogate to Leeds to work their GDP is counted in Leeds but their capita is counted in Bradford or North Yorkshire.
While I agree that looking at smaller geographies is useful, and indeed I do in the link top, we need to consider that overall Greater Manchester, and all of the North's other cities, just have very little prosperity to go around. There are pockets of wealth, but they are pockets against a backdrop of poverty. And of course in London there are pockets of poverty, but they are pockets against a backdrop of wealth. You can convince yourself of this by looking at the ONS small area income estimate dataset and map.
I live down the road from OP in Harrogate and it's an incredibly desirable and affluent place
Also while I'm commenting. I know OP isn't saying the North is shit. Just poor(ish).
Nevertheless I just want to say I love the north of England and genuinely think it's one of the best places in the world. We've already established that I'm in one of the better areas so my perspective might be a little skewed, but I honestly think it's an incredible place and I hope this doesn't put people off visiting.
Also from the Harrogate area, but moved to London for uni and haven't made it back yet. Whilst Harrogate is very nice and affluent, I'd say the biggest difference isn't the personal wealth but the council wealth. There's far far far more wealth in the south and I've honestly been amazed at just how big the gap is, especially noticeable in infrastructure and services like roads and schools. Even the schools in poor areas of London are better than the local Harrogate schools. Just look at Yorks council funding (now merged with Harrogate) which has the lowest funding per capita in the UK.
Despite this tho I'd much rather live in Harrogate and enjoy the countryside than London tbh, plus people are less miserable there...
Poor vs shit is an interesting discussion. If your life, your environment, isn't shit, why would you even care if are poor? Would you rather be rich and unhappy? (I spend very little, yet I don't feel deprived.)
Isn't this similar in, say, US cities? I'm not well travelled in the US, but Chicago, New York, LA, are all incredibly wealthy cities with pockets of abject poverty.
Same elsewhere in (some parts of) Europe. Paris for example, though perhaps for different reasons.
It would appear that just having access to good education (or worse, merely being close to places with good education) doesn't mean you can consume it and advance in life. Probably ditto for other levelling up tools like apprenticeships, jobs etc.
It's a 15 minute train ride to Manchester. 30-40 min drive/bus trip to Manchester, 1 hour train ride to Leeds and slightly longer drive.
Generally Tameside is well serviced, you got all the amenities you would expect and location wise you have very good access for commuting. Manchester, Salford, Leeds university all easily accessible. Tamesides location makes it popular as a commuter location looking for lower costs of living.
It's always been a working class place. Despite the wealth of the industrial revolution, the grand factories mostly now demolished and buildings, the majority of people where/are working class low paid workers and didn't see that money although the money built grand markets and highstreets for workers to spend the wages.
Tameside is a low socioeconomic area which is generational.
I went to an at best, average school. The importance of school wasn't really seen, or taught at home or in school. Myself, I had a mixed schooling history. Troublesome/difficult, likely influenced through parents attitudes, being bullied at times, not academically smart but not dumb, dyslexic and can remember one specific teacher publicly shaming me for not being able to spell my surname instead of trying to teach me. My social worker partner is adamant i'm on the spectrum. I feel there was a nurturing missing generally at these average, low social economic schools and my time could of been better with the right support in school. Eck I got a C GCSE in maths but learnt a bit of category theory, Haskell and functional programming myself.
Those who had a reasonable fortunate home life seem to of done just ok in their adult life from the area.
Those who were disruptive, high level of truancy, poor parenting, some are dead, some are in prison, some look like they should be dead with addiction. Their kids will likely follow down the same path they did and they've had more kids than the people who turned out alright.
Growing up in low social economic environments is hard to break out of. It starts at home with the importance of education and it's hard to start at home when your parents and parents parents never seen the importance and then the schooling isn't prepared to deal with it.
I broke out of it leaving as fast as I could, hard work when younger and some luck.
The north can be raw, probably not so much these days but "southern pansy" or "posh", "gay" is used disparagingly for people trying to better themself. I grew up not in poverty and not well off, in a area that wasn't the worst but not great. My mum see's anyone who has done well for themselfs as "posh" looking down on her and that can be a common theme with the less fortunate people I know in the area. This is a generational attitude.
The story seems common over the world. People growing up less well off struggle to get out of being less well off and it often starts at home and education and it's hard to start at home in the environment you are in and education doesn't happen due to home environment apart from the few outliers who do overcome the odds stacked against them.
It's funny reading these articles from people who haven't grew up poor, in the north, never seen a council estate, or the way of life, talking about Universities in 1066 and Northern Conquests as a reason.
"It's funny reading these articles from people who haven't grew up poor, in the north, never seen a council estate, or the way of life". I didn't grow up poor, but I did grow up in the North, went to the local comprehensive, and have lived on plenty of council estates. When I lived in Manchester I went to Ashton plenty of times, it's not that different to Hull.
This comment needs exploring more please! The fundamental ask of policymakers is "what can we do?" and you've alluded to some factors you think are key, eg stable family units, respect for education and attainment etc. Would love to read more.
I grew up on a council estate and escaped that environment. I credit a headteacher that directed me to one of the better secondary schools, and a well run public library that was a safe third space between home and school. Curious what other escapees credit, and what lessons might be drawn.
To a certain extent, would making the productive parts of manchester, even just 2X more productive not fix this over time in the same way that it has in London?
If you look back even say 30 years ago in London, you'd of said the same thing about places like Hackney, as you do now about Tameside. Today it houses some of the most desired and valuable real estate not only in London, and by extension the UK, but in the world.
One could argue that the money flowing into Hackney was largely from the London media/finance elite who probably were made 2X more productive by IT and City deregulation. The result was Hackney's gentrification.
But gentrification, is not the same as a community leveling up. The former provides an influx of new residents with money to spend in the community. The latter creates new opportunities for the existing residents within the community.
>30 years ago in London, you'd of said the same thing about places like Hackney...[and] today it houses some of the most desired and valuable real estate
are you saying that gentrification of Hackney did not simply entail wealthier people moving in and displacing the local population, but rather soaring incomes for the people who lived there?
We also shifted largely into a service based economy, shutdown a lot of mines and mills (for better or for worse) which were primarily more north based.
More than 2/3rds of my graduating physics class went straight into banking, as there was no relevant industry to pick them up... and as someone with several postdoctoral degrees, yet no house or meaningful assets... who could blame them for going into banking in this large miserable sprawl of a city utterly devoted to it?
> More than 2/3rds of my graduating physics class went straight into banking
This is why I advise people to never study physical sciences or non-software engineering. There just aren’t many jobs for it in the UK. And even fewer that pay well.
The usefulness of that depends on whether you think academic higher education is vocational ("I'm doing a chemistry degree so that I can be a chemist") or inquisitive ("I'm doing a chemistry degree because it's so heckin' interesting").
I'd tend to advise people to study stuff they find interesting. I'd wager the percentage of degree holders doing a job that's directly related to their degree is in the minority, and that's not a bad thing.
I don't live in the UK, but here in the USA I studied Physics and Music and then got a job programming. A lot of it was dumb luck, but I want to emphasize that school is about learning, not about vocational training. My experience in programming was due to being a giant nerd, not school.
I think another big difference is that in the UK higher education is not really valued. In Germany people get PhDs because then they can get into much higher paying jobs, even if the PhD is not in a topic related much to the job. For example because I have a physics PhD I was able to get an entry level software dev position with a wage of 73k where someone with a bachelors may get only 40-50k. I don’t think that dynamic exists in the UK
I do wonder how long this will hold up. It's true (though cliche) that software is "eating the world", but as the low hanging fruit gets automated away you do need people that understand more complex underlying processes to work on the software. I feel the right combination at this point is to do a little of both.
It's a consequence of companies outsourcing to countries where they can get away with slave labor and a complete lack of environmental regulation. There's nothing natural about it.
The problem is de-industrialization gets your society dependent on authoritarians who rent out there slaves to the lowest bidder and who then can wield you like a puppet.
And the focusing on a more abstract economy- produces a inability to even perceive physical products, limitations and overall reality and the world.
If everything is an abstraction, then problems like climate change, running out of energy or societal instability, surely can be doctored, narrated and abstracted away. And they cant. Which is a fundamental incompetence that is pretty obvious by now.
One stuck in such a delusion, would imagine it optimal to blast furnace a mountain of money towards "elegant" formulas, unable to perceive, that those formulas at the end of the day have to produce fertilizer to feed a world of billions even when the crops fail.
>More than 2/3rds of my graduating physics class went straight into banking
How does one get hired into banking with a physics degree? For what kinds of jobs? Where I live right now you only get into banking with a economics/business degree. Anything else and your resume goes in the bin.
I think banks / insurance companies are looking for solid math skills. If you can learn / work with higher math for physics, you can work with financial math.
A bank is a very diverse organism. There was a group at our bank, they knew very little English and none of the business/economy. Their task was to solve differential equations, something physicists are trained to do.
I haven't been in banking for a while (I'm on the investment side of finance now) but I have been in finance for 20 years now. I'd say that at least in London, my experience is that a majority have degrees which weren't economics/business - sciences and (general) engineering degrees are very common, and maths and comp sci aren't uncommon.
I agree it sounds odd. It's a phrase I've moved to using after fifteen years of being shouted at for using other phrases. North England, while sounding a bit odd, generates much fewer rage replies than other formulations. There's also a slight preference on my part for shorter phrases because of social media.
Any article which seeks to explore the problems of northern England and doesn't mention the weather is fundamentally incomplete.
I've lived in every part of England, but being in the north west for the last decade has highlighted how much our mental health can be damaged by constant grey skies and rain. A population predisposed to feeling hopeless naturally leads to a less vibrant economy.
The diagram of the northern "urban" centre also fails to point out the Peak District, though you can detect it by noticing what looks like an obvious gap in the middle of the circle. In the middle of the London circle is, of course, the centre of London, world-famous capital city of the United Kingdom, seat of power of its government and monarchy. In the middle of the Northern circle? Some mountains and the occasional picturesque little village...
(The weather might also be a factor here too. The elevated regions are much colder, snowier and windier, causing problems with transport. Getting between Sheffield and Manchester at this time of year can be a painful business.)
In my comparisons with the Netherlands I explore this in detail. The centre of the Netherlands' main urban region is a six metre below sea level swamp that the Dutch never have and never will build on and which is just as much of an obstacle to agglomeration as the Pennines. So I really don't think this matters.
As for the weather, Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Denmark are hardly renowned for their fantastic weather and they're all doing much better than North England. Meanwhile Southern Spain, Southern Italy, and Greece are lovely places but not doing well economically. I don't think the weather is a good excuse for Northern underperformance.
The author says that the region is poor because, after the decline of industry, it didn’t have universities to drive tech, finance and services. But it sounds like the problem is simply deindustrialization in the first place, same as the US Rust Belt.
Material wealth means having stuff. You can only get stuff by making it or taking it from the earth.
Meanwhile Chinese cities are sparkling and new, and their workers enjoy a high standard of living at low cost, not unlike Northern England or Cleveland, Ohio 100 years ago.
Because they make a lot of stuff. It’s that simple.
Industrialization worked for China recently for the same reason it worked for western nations more than a century ago: you can drive local economic growth even if the population has low education.
Once you have a strong local economy based on manufacturing, you have to drive innovation to sustain it. So you use the economic output to fund education and research, to create new categories of products and services, which create durable competitive advantage.
The U.S. has succeeded wildly with this playbook. China is currently following this playbook. The author is saying that the playbook in Northern England was interrupted by the South.
Deindustrialization happened all across Europe.
Some countries got over it and found new ways to make money. Besides you can make money with trading stuff... Anything that is sold in central Europe has to pass through the port of Rotterdam.
The brain drain from northern England to London is massive.
There are four high income tech/finance/media households on my culdesac in east London, thankfully including my own. Of the eight adults, I am from London but the other seven are from the midlands or north of England.
Sort of an aside from the article, but I never feel like these geographic averages translate well to densely populated countries like England.
The North, like all parts of the country, has pockets of extreme affluence near areas of relative poverty, with a lot of middle income households scattered about the place too.
Talking to some southerners you’d think the whole of the North was a dump, and I worry people write off a truly beautiful part of the UK because of this misconception.
> Limited success such as in Manchester, whose economy has nearly kept up with East German cities while the rest of North England falls behind,
Woa is this a typo? I know little about England, and I hadn't realized that "keeping up with East German cities" is considered a success. I mean isn't East Germany rather well known for not keeping up all that well with the rest of Germany either?
Not a typo I'm afraid. East Germany's economy overtook North England's economy in 2010. Excluding Berlin, East Germany's economy overtook North England's economy in 2013. Every East German large city (Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, Halle, Chemnitz) is today a stronger economy than every North English large city except Manchester. Manchester is still a weaker economy than Berlin, Dresden, and Leipzig.
Yes. I think the author's point is that the standards are that low up here in North England, and outside of Manchester it's worse than in East Germany.
I think that means growth rates, not absolute wealth.
Not all of the north is poor. Cheshire is richer than outer London or the home counties. If you adjust for the cost of living more of the north would be.
I think it's a bit more subtle than that. For one the author tells us they think this is an example of success story. Although I guess it depends on when you are measuring from, and they may be being somewhat tongue in cheek with their choice of East Germany
I think the point is that we would expect East German cities to have reasonable relative growth post-unification because we are taking a relatively structurally deprived area within a wider more successful economy.
That Manchester has kept up with areas where you'd expect to see reasonable growth, is positive. I suppose there's also the hint that this suggests that this has been allowed to happen by central government, but I could be making that up.
Readit News
Manchester has a GDP per capita of £59,000. Tameside, the poorest area in Greater Manchester, has a GDP per capita of £19,000. Leeds has a GDP per capita of £42k; ten miles away, Bradford has a GDP per capita of £23.6k.
Those disparities are really difficult to explain in terms of infrastructure or commercial investment. Similar disparities exist within London, although for plausibly different reasons; compare Lewisham with the neighbouring Southwark, Camden with Haringey, or that one bit of Tower Hamlets with the rest of Tower Hamlets.
I think we need to be looking much more granularly at the gaps between neighbouring areas, schools and families - the human capital factors that trap people in lives of poverty. Building a university or innovation hub in Knowsley probably won't do much for the huge numbers of kids there who leave school unable to read and write.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/bulle...
For my precise work on the hyper-local angle you're asking after I did this analysis of Greater Manchester when I lived there in 2018 and it holds up really well. https://www.tomforth.co.uk/inequalityingreatermanchester/
Specifically on the GDP per capita numbers you quote, it's important to know what the "capita" means here. In your numbers, the capita is of residents. So people who commute into Manchester to work are counted in the GDP side of the equation and not in the capita side of the equation giving a largely meaningless number when comparing the strength of an economy. In the case of Leeds and Bradford that you mention it's largely the same effect. When someone commutes from Ilkley or Harrogate to Leeds to work their GDP is counted in Leeds but their capita is counted in Bradford or North Yorkshire.
While I agree that looking at smaller geographies is useful, and indeed I do in the link top, we need to consider that overall Greater Manchester, and all of the North's other cities, just have very little prosperity to go around. There are pockets of wealth, but they are pockets against a backdrop of poverty. And of course in London there are pockets of poverty, but they are pockets against a backdrop of wealth. You can convince yourself of this by looking at the ONS small area income estimate dataset and map.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...
I live down the road from OP in Harrogate and it's an incredibly desirable and affluent place
Also while I'm commenting. I know OP isn't saying the North is shit. Just poor(ish).
Nevertheless I just want to say I love the north of England and genuinely think it's one of the best places in the world. We've already established that I'm in one of the better areas so my perspective might be a little skewed, but I honestly think it's an incredible place and I hope this doesn't put people off visiting.
Despite this tho I'd much rather live in Harrogate and enjoy the countryside than London tbh, plus people are less miserable there...
Did they fix the smell issues?
Same elsewhere in (some parts of) Europe. Paris for example, though perhaps for different reasons.
It would appear that just having access to good education (or worse, merely being close to places with good education) doesn't mean you can consume it and advance in life. Probably ditto for other levelling up tools like apprenticeships, jobs etc.
It's a 15 minute train ride to Manchester. 30-40 min drive/bus trip to Manchester, 1 hour train ride to Leeds and slightly longer drive.
Generally Tameside is well serviced, you got all the amenities you would expect and location wise you have very good access for commuting. Manchester, Salford, Leeds university all easily accessible. Tamesides location makes it popular as a commuter location looking for lower costs of living.
It's always been a working class place. Despite the wealth of the industrial revolution, the grand factories mostly now demolished and buildings, the majority of people where/are working class low paid workers and didn't see that money although the money built grand markets and highstreets for workers to spend the wages.
Tameside is a low socioeconomic area which is generational.
I went to an at best, average school. The importance of school wasn't really seen, or taught at home or in school. Myself, I had a mixed schooling history. Troublesome/difficult, likely influenced through parents attitudes, being bullied at times, not academically smart but not dumb, dyslexic and can remember one specific teacher publicly shaming me for not being able to spell my surname instead of trying to teach me. My social worker partner is adamant i'm on the spectrum. I feel there was a nurturing missing generally at these average, low social economic schools and my time could of been better with the right support in school. Eck I got a C GCSE in maths but learnt a bit of category theory, Haskell and functional programming myself.
Those who had a reasonable fortunate home life seem to of done just ok in their adult life from the area.
Those who were disruptive, high level of truancy, poor parenting, some are dead, some are in prison, some look like they should be dead with addiction. Their kids will likely follow down the same path they did and they've had more kids than the people who turned out alright.
Growing up in low social economic environments is hard to break out of. It starts at home with the importance of education and it's hard to start at home when your parents and parents parents never seen the importance and then the schooling isn't prepared to deal with it.
I broke out of it leaving as fast as I could, hard work when younger and some luck.
The north can be raw, probably not so much these days but "southern pansy" or "posh", "gay" is used disparagingly for people trying to better themself. I grew up not in poverty and not well off, in a area that wasn't the worst but not great. My mum see's anyone who has done well for themselfs as "posh" looking down on her and that can be a common theme with the less fortunate people I know in the area. This is a generational attitude.
The story seems common over the world. People growing up less well off struggle to get out of being less well off and it often starts at home and education and it's hard to start at home in the environment you are in and education doesn't happen due to home environment apart from the few outliers who do overcome the odds stacked against them.
It's funny reading these articles from people who haven't grew up poor, in the north, never seen a council estate, or the way of life, talking about Universities in 1066 and Northern Conquests as a reason.
I grew up on a council estate and escaped that environment. I credit a headteacher that directed me to one of the better secondary schools, and a well run public library that was a safe third space between home and school. Curious what other escapees credit, and what lessons might be drawn.
Off topic, but I just wanted to say that Joy Division is one of my fave bands of all time.
If you look back even say 30 years ago in London, you'd of said the same thing about places like Hackney, as you do now about Tameside. Today it houses some of the most desired and valuable real estate not only in London, and by extension the UK, but in the world.
But gentrification, is not the same as a community leveling up. The former provides an influx of new residents with money to spend in the community. The latter creates new opportunities for the existing residents within the community.
are you saying that gentrification of Hackney did not simply entail wealthier people moving in and displacing the local population, but rather soaring incomes for the people who lived there?
So, I don’t think we care about land here but rather people.
More than 2/3rds of my graduating physics class went straight into banking, as there was no relevant industry to pick them up... and as someone with several postdoctoral degrees, yet no house or meaningful assets... who could blame them for going into banking in this large miserable sprawl of a city utterly devoted to it?
This is why I advise people to never study physical sciences or non-software engineering. There just aren’t many jobs for it in the UK. And even fewer that pay well.
I'd tend to advise people to study stuff they find interesting. I'd wager the percentage of degree holders doing a job that's directly related to their degree is in the minority, and that's not a bad thing.
This does not seem to be a specific phenomenon. Only a few of my former PhD condensed matter physics colleagues did not end up in finance.
I think the big problem is too much reliance on on service sector.
And the focusing on a more abstract economy- produces a inability to even perceive physical products, limitations and overall reality and the world. If everything is an abstraction, then problems like climate change, running out of energy or societal instability, surely can be doctored, narrated and abstracted away. And they cant. Which is a fundamental incompetence that is pretty obvious by now.
One stuck in such a delusion, would imagine it optimal to blast furnace a mountain of money towards "elegant" formulas, unable to perceive, that those formulas at the end of the day have to produce fertilizer to feed a world of billions even when the crops fail.
How does one get hired into banking with a physics degree? For what kinds of jobs? Where I live right now you only get into banking with a economics/business degree. Anything else and your resume goes in the bin.
My experience: even when it comes to only implementing financial products, banks prefer mathematicians/physicists as software developers.
I've lived in every part of England, but being in the north west for the last decade has highlighted how much our mental health can be damaged by constant grey skies and rain. A population predisposed to feeling hopeless naturally leads to a less vibrant economy.
(The weather might also be a factor here too. The elevated regions are much colder, snowier and windier, causing problems with transport. Getting between Sheffield and Manchester at this time of year can be a painful business.)
As for the weather, Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Denmark are hardly renowned for their fantastic weather and they're all doing much better than North England. Meanwhile Southern Spain, Southern Italy, and Greece are lovely places but not doing well economically. I don't think the weather is a good excuse for Northern underperformance.
Material wealth means having stuff. You can only get stuff by making it or taking it from the earth.
Meanwhile Chinese cities are sparkling and new, and their workers enjoy a high standard of living at low cost, not unlike Northern England or Cleveland, Ohio 100 years ago.
Because they make a lot of stuff. It’s that simple.
Once you have a strong local economy based on manufacturing, you have to drive innovation to sustain it. So you use the economic output to fund education and research, to create new categories of products and services, which create durable competitive advantage.
The U.S. has succeeded wildly with this playbook. China is currently following this playbook. The author is saying that the playbook in Northern England was interrupted by the South.
There are four high income tech/finance/media households on my culdesac in east London, thankfully including my own. Of the eight adults, I am from London but the other seven are from the midlands or north of England.
The North, like all parts of the country, has pockets of extreme affluence near areas of relative poverty, with a lot of middle income households scattered about the place too.
Talking to some southerners you’d think the whole of the North was a dump, and I worry people write off a truly beautiful part of the UK because of this misconception.
Woa is this a typo? I know little about England, and I hadn't realized that "keeping up with East German cities" is considered a success. I mean isn't East Germany rather well known for not keeping up all that well with the rest of Germany either?
All the data is from the OECD using comparable definitions of the cities and collecting at https://tomforth.co.uk/humancapital/
Not all of the north is poor. Cheshire is richer than outer London or the home counties. If you adjust for the cost of living more of the north would be.
North poor, south rich is very simplistic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_of_the_Unite...
I think the point is that we would expect East German cities to have reasonable relative growth post-unification because we are taking a relatively structurally deprived area within a wider more successful economy.
That Manchester has kept up with areas where you'd expect to see reasonable growth, is positive. I suppose there's also the hint that this suggests that this has been allowed to happen by central government, but I could be making that up.